High Sierra Topix

I spent 3 days on Santa Rosa Island in the Channel Islands last week, wow a new favorite place. On the boat ride over with Island Packers we found lots of dolphins and whales. We came up to one spot that was boiling with sea lions and dolphins and then suddenly 2 big hump back whales popped up in the middle of the party, a pretty cool place to be with a camera. It’s a 1½ mile hike to the campground, felt a lot longer with a 60-pound pack full of camera gear. Saturday I did a 12 mile hike to Carrington Point, beautiful grasslands and wild flowers. It was overcast most of my trip, but the coves and beaches still had that cool emerald green look. My last day I hiked up to the Torrey Pine forest and was lucky to meet up with some of the local deer. Coming back Island Packers took us along the west side of Santa Cruz Island with a stop at Painted Cave. Santa Rosa is an incredible place, I’m going back next week.

Trip Pictures:

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder.tcl ... _id=598288

Beautiful! I like the "sea party". Very cool!

Nice photos doug. Love that whale photo. Very cool

Beautiful shots. That Painted Cave is just amazing.

doug395 wrote:Santa Rosa is an incredible place, I’m going back next week.

Sounds great! A bunch of our NorCal hikers are going to Santa Cruz island in June, too.

As an aside, did you see that there's a proposal in Congress to turn Santa Rosa island into a hunting preserve for active military?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 84_pf.html